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Event: ZineZone - Susan Meiselas
Date: Thursday, Feb.25, 1999
Time: 6:00 - 6:45pm PT
Transcript
The Talk City Network (tm) and ZineZone.com (tm)welcome you to chat tonight with Susan Meiselas. Join us as Susan shares with us what it's like to capture the perfect shot in a war zone. Please welcome Susan!
Susan: Greetings! Glad to be here.
SueDM says: Welcome, Susan! How did you know that you wanted to be a photojournalist?
Susan: I didn't know until pretty late in life. I went to college to be an ethnographic filmmaker, that is, working in film in indigenous communities - anthropological filmmaking. I sort of evolved into being a photographer.
Manon says: When you first started out did you have to work at other jobs to make a living? I imagine that photojournalism doesn't pay well at first?
Susan: Precisely true! I worked at teaching photography in the public schools of New York and later Mississippi and North Carolina. The teaching gave me a little fund from which I broke out into the professional ranks. The first five years I was teaching and didn't start working professionally in the photographic field until 1976. While I was teaching I started doing my own work on the side. It was documentary photography but not aimed towards publications. To me, doing documentary photography was self satisfactory and personal. It satisfied my own personal curiosity. I completed a series called "Carnival Strippers" that was exhibited in a number of small museums and galleries and then became a book published in English and French. The text in the book was used to create a stage play, interestingly enough.
DavidT says: How do you keep your eye fresh and open to new insights after doing all the research you must have to do for an assignment? (News and historical accounts, after all, bring their own biases.)
Susan: I think the world is always a surprise. No matter how much research I do, I cannot anticipate what I will find out in the field.
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Photography
